This piece contains spoilers for MiSide as well as Doki Doki Literature Club and You and Me and Her. The gist of it is that if you wanna go in unspoiled; MiSide rocks, you should play it. In fact, you should play it without knowing anything about it. What are you waiting for??? Go play it!!!
It’s easy to approach MiSide with a level of skepticism or even full on distaste for its genre. MiSide (a title that phonetically mimics the last two syllables of homicide) presents itself as something you’re all too familiar with: a quirky dating simulator type game where all is not as it seems. One may immediately draw a comparison to what could be considered the western luminary of this sort of game: Doki Doki Literature Club.
Well known and often reviled, DDLC is far from the first of its kind, owing a lot of its inspiration to several different games but primarily to You and Me and Her, a visual novel that uses your actions against you and presents scenes of horrific violence as your girlfriend from previous routes sees you romance another character and feels betrayed by your infidelity. DDLC takes this premise, a cute game that becomes violent as self aware entities in the game files start to practice their agency, and uses it to tell a story about existentialism and feeling trapped. Monika, one of DDLC’s four dateable girls and the perpetrator behind all the horrific all things you’ve witnessed, wants to be something more than she is, trapped in the boundaries of 2D space and computer files. Not only that, but she wants to know what it feels like to truly love someone. She wants her feelings validated by a flesh and blood human outside of the limited world that exists around her.
In the closing hour of DDLC, Monika calls you by your real birth name instead of the name you’ve provided at the start of that game, taking that information from what you’ve named your PC. You realize that you need to open the game’s folder on your computer, and in order to put a stop to this madness, delete her character file. She pleads with you to make it stop, an act of violence against a violent creature, as you slowly watch her wither and die from lines of code and an onscreen deletion bar. Monika is gone for good. As the credits roll, you hear someone ask if you can hear them, the first and only time you hear a spoken voice in the entire game. She sings you one last bittersweet serenade set to the game’s main theme you’ve heard many times by now, lamenting her ability to make you love her, before concluding “if I don’t know how to love you, I’ll leave you be.” The game then corrupts itself, making it unable to boot without re-downloading it, thus restoring Monika in the game files once more.
At least that’s how it USED TO end before they released Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, a game that fundamentally can’t utilize your computer’s file viewer or the need to redownload your game, because they need to sell this game on the Nintendo Switch. So they replace all those on computer interactions with an in-game overlay that functions much the same way, but in the process of taking those meta interactions and making them part of the game, it undercuts their impact and makes it feel less special. Dan Salvato I appreciate that you want to make money off of your hard work but you need to LEARN how to RESPECT your own ART that you STOLE ALL THE IDEAS FOR ANYWAYS!!!!!!!!!!!
So, knowing now how You and Me and Her and DDLC both utilize metanarrative and the established genre form of Cute Girls Doing Cute Things (until things aren’t so cute anymore!!!), you as the potential game player are equipped with an understanding of how these games typically play out. Got it? Good. Now we’re formally equipped to tackle 2024’s MiSide, the latest entry into this hyper-specific dating-coded oeuvre.
The beauty of MiSide is that it expects you to already have these expectations. It knows why you’re playing this. It’s deeply familiar with DDLC and wants you to draw direct parallels… just so it can slash through them like a knife through the neck of an anime schoolgirl. And it does it by, get this, having fun.
MiSide starts with you, the player, a reclusive nerd who wakes up every day, does some work on his computer, and goes to bed, all without ever leaving his room. Eventually, his waifu simulator mobile game pushes out an update, which you have no choice but to download. We’re quickly introduced to Mita, MiSide’s semi-titular central character. You help Mita with some idle game style tasks before she says she wishes she could really meet you. She stops, and says she has an idea. The camera slowly zooms in on her before she celebrates her success. You, the player, put your phone down to realize you are no longer in your room, but in an apartment remarkably similar to Mita’s abode only previously seen from the top-down.
You soon meet her in the flesh (or rather, in the 3rd dimension) only to find out she has somehow isekai’d you into her world. You now live in the game, where game logic replaces real world logic, something the player character anxiously shares his frustrations about. After living together for a short time, things repeatedly seem off about Mita and her home. You find a collection of cartridges that have the names of other boys on them. Mita feeds you pills for a sort of virtual sickness you’re feeling and promptly proceeds to cover your eyes as you take them. The banging noise coming from her wardrobe keeps getting louder and harder to ignore. You confront her about this, and she laments her inability to keep you entertained. “Not again…” she says.
You head into her basement only to find… Mita, locked in a cage. She’s different though. Not only does she have a different hairstyle, but she speaks to you differently, and offers to help you escape. This is the moment where MiSide starts to show its hand. The other Mita comes in, kitchen knife in hand, in a sequence where she chides the caged up Mita, and you have to sneak around the room to avoid her seeing you and stabbing you immediately.
Over the course of some mind-bending traversal through odd liminal spaces that seem to go forever and bend in on each other, you learn more about the world. As Mita said, you’re inside the game. However, you’re not just in a single instance of it. MiSide uses the language of version control to explain that not only are there different versions of the game that you must traverse through to find the truth about the yandere-coded force that’s pursuing you, dubbed by the other Mitas as Crazy Mita, but also that each version of the game has near-countless instances of the application, each with their own Mita with their own unique personality traits.
Where MiSide differs from others of its ilk is in this core conceit: you meet a bunch of other Mitas. And all of them are super endearing. MiSide smartly takes breaks from its intense horror sequences to introduce much needed levity. You meet a handful of different Mitas that help you (or hinder you) to varying degrees. The Mita that you broke out of Crazy Mita’s basement is dubbed Kind Mita, as she accompanies you through your travels across different versions. She quickly introduces you to Cool Mita, AKA Cappie, who distinguishes herself from other Mitas by wearing a cap. And gloves! Kind Mita asks you to hang out with her for a while as she comes up with a plan, and hanging out with Cappie is a blast. She’s fun, she’s funny, she’s energetic, she challenges you to a Dance Dance Revolution style minigame (which you can, at best, tie her at), and she’s just so happy that you’re here.
Comedy and Horror are a potent mix, as shown off by Lethal Company’s flawless execution of its formula: fool around with your friends and have a silly time until you hear noises that simply shouldn’t exist in the darkness beyond what your eyes can see. You learn, you adapt, you still die sometimes before you go back to the moments where you and your friends can fool around. MiSide strikes a similar balance, complementing its horror sections with comedy sections that land so, so well. Execution in comedy is hard and it’s easy to do badly, and the same goes for horror. Yet MiSide’s comedy is impeccably written, even if there are a few translation errors. The writing, too, doesn’t just excel at comedic delivery, but also in its reflective meta-commentary that you’ve come to expect from this type of game. Each of the Mitas you meet seem to grow a fond attachment to you over the short time you spend with them, even if some of them are far more hostile towards your presence when you first meet. They may have distinguishing personality traits, but they’re designed, fundamentally, as characters for an adult-oriented video game that want to please their player.
Games like You and Me and Her and DDLC are very self-serious. They don’t allow you to enjoy the world they’re set in for what it is and instead want you to feel big emotions. MiSide’s dips into comedy set it apart so starkly, but it also takes aspects from its contemporaries and twists them in interesting narrative ways. The second playthrough of DDLC (when it gets SPOOKY) utilizes bugs as game language to emphasize the horror. If you’re experiencing a “bug” it’s because they want you to feel unsettled by it. In MiSide, bugs are a reality of game design, thus the need for version control. A bug will exist in the world as something the player, a coder with technical experience, can squash as he plays in order to progress the story. DDLC uses the game-about-a-game framework to explore existentialism, but MiSide asks that if our lives are so fundamentally broken and monotonous, wouldn’t you much rather prefer to live in a video game?
MiSide’s moments of reprieve are the narrative special sauce that gives it the kick that makes it so special. However, if that was all MiSide was, a DDLC-like with occasional bits of humor, then I probably wouldn’t make such a glowing recommendation of it. The other part of the formula is that exploring the world and seeing the sights it wants to show you feels magical.
MiSide’s traversal of the backrooms of the game-behind-the-game owes really clear inspiration to games like The Stanley Parable and PT. It employs a ton of tricks with 3D space to bend the world in often non-euclidean ways. This isn’t Antichamber, obviously; you’re not in an open space trying to solve its obtuse logic. It’s very linear, but it employs mind-bending visuals to make incredibly memorable setpieces out of just walking from one place to another. Often, during these parts too, you’re not being actively pursued or spooked by creepy-scaries. It leaves you with a lot of room to take in the scenes as they present them to you.
Additionally, the world is peppered with tons of different minigames to break up what you’re doing. The sheer breadth of different games you can play within MiSide is another aspect of the exploration that makes it feel so unique. You truly never know what you’re going to see next. You could be playing DDR with Cappie in one scene and playing a DOOM clone in the next. Part of it feels like a portfolio piece for the developers, clearly wanting to experiment with making tons of different types of games, but that sheer scope makes the possibility space of MiSide feel limitless. On top of that, there are also collectibles and different outfits to unlock, encouraging you to take in the different spaces with a thorough eye but, also, not to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, after all. What’s the worst that could happen?
MiSide is a game so thoroughly interested in wanting you to enjoy it that it breaks out of the stuffy confines of the typical DDLC-like formula to become something far more special and memorable. I tend to sit with horror games a lot after I play them, often losing sleep as my lizard brain paints portraits of some of their most disturbing moments. DDLC’s scene where you stare at a dead body of one of the girls and physically can’t do anything else, tricking you into hitting the skip button, fast-forwarding through a sequence of her body decomposing over the course of several days, is an image burned into my brain. Mouthwashing’s entire sense of impending dread leading to a cacophony of brutality and violence probably single-handedly offset my sleep schedule. But when I remember moments from MiSide, a game with very terrifying sequences of its own, the moments I remember are dancing with Cappie, the incredible tsundere Mila showing you her special sword technique, or the moments the game shifts perspective in ways I never saw coming. MiSide might be scary and bloody and may seriously unsettle you at times, but most importantly, it wants you to remember what a good time you had.
As Fun As It Is Fucked Up
"Superb"
A sensational camp-horror thrill ride that breaks away from the self-seriousness of its contemporaries.
